Broken Rules
by M. of the Mountains
Summary: What happened after Matthew left Diana and Marcus behind, in the wake of the photo incident? Now, we know.
1. Chapter 1

"No," Matthew said, giving Marcus a tightly controlled smile. "I'm going with her."

"But—" Matthew shook his head sharply, and turned for the stairs, leaving his son gaping after him. Marcus had never seen that look in his eyes before: he'd seen protective Matthew plenty of times, angry Matthew quite often, and exasperated Matthew more times than he could count.

After all, Marcus had put plenty of energy over the decades towards frustrating his father's control over him. But this level of all three was unusual, even for his mercurial father. Before he could fully take in what that meant, the witch stirred behind him.

"Matthew?" She whispered, still half asleep—perhaps mistaking his silhouette for his father's beyond her closed eyelids.

"Matthew left, Diana," Marcus said, tone significantly more gentle than it had been seconds previously. Knowing his father's standards for chivalry, he kept his back to her as he spoke, still staring down the stairwell which his father had taken. "He'll be back soon. I'm here for now."

Diana, face half-buried in a pillow, grunted in response—returning, Marcus hoped, to sleep. He didn't yet know what to say to the witch that his father was about to make his lifelong mate, and Marcus's stepmother. Not yet.

His luck, however, remained at an all-time low. "Marcus?" Diana asked, her voice significantly clearer. He stifled a sigh as he turned—Matthew's standards, after all, surely also included looking at someone when speaking with them. Even if they were a witch, in bed, and one's future stepmother.

"Yes, Diana?" She was sitting up slightly, looking as exhausted as before but with a greater sense of purpose in her eyes than the moment he'd arrived.

"Why are you still here?"

Marcus paused on the threshold of her room, leaning against the door frame. He shrugged. "Matthew asked me to stay," he said.

"Why did you?" Diana's curiosity about vampire customs seemed to have peaked. "Why… obey?"

"Because he's Matthew, and he'll have my head," Marcus said, with a wry smile. Sensing the witch's frown before it fully formed, he continued, smile fading to seriousness. "More importantly, because he's my father, and I owe him my life a thousand times over."

"Oh." Diana paused, biting her lip. It was the sort of movement that Marcus had learned long ago not to react to, even when warmbloods drew blood. But he couldn't help the sharp intake of breath that escaped his control, not with Diana's witch blood calling to him nearly as much as it did to Matthew.

"Marcus…" she started. "How old are you, then?"

He smirked. "Older than I look?" he quipped, echoing Matthew's common refrain. "About two hundred years, give or take a few decades."

"Two hundred," Diana repeated, searching his face. "You don't look a day over twenty."

"And my father doesn't treat me like a day over twenty either," Marcus said, smirk disappearing again. Noticing the bitter edge to his tone, Diana frowned.

"He seems to trust you, though," she said quietly. "Or else you wouldn't be here."

"To an extent," Marcus said. He shifted his weight against the door frame. "When he's allowed me freedom in the past, there have been… problems. So there are limits—frankly, Diana, I'm rather surprised he's let me stay with you now."

"And why is that?" Diana asked. He groaned.

"Let's leave that question to him, shall we? But for my part, I've done things that displeased him, and he's never quite forgiven me for them," Marcus said, his eyes glinting with memories of New Orleans and empty tables. "That I'm here is more testimony to his… desperation… than to his trust."

"So he doesn't trust easily?"

Marcus's lips twitched. "If you want to understand Matthew, it's better to ask him directly," he said, as the witch raised her brows daringly. "No, really— it's vampire tradition, Diana. If you want to hear his stories, you can only hear them from him."

"Surely you can tell me something," she sighed, batting her eyelashes at him dramatically.

He chuckled, reaching for the bedside chair and swinging his legs over it. "There's no way that works on me, Diana, when my father's around. But perhaps… a good bedside manner includes many good stories, after all."

She smiled at him, eyes bright. "Tell me anything," she said. "I promise I won't snitch."

Marcus shuddered. "You'd best not, if you'd like to have the same doctor tomorrow—" drawing another smile from the tired witch. She closed her eyes. "Fine, then. When Matthew had first turned me, we set out into the forests of the New World. It was relatively peaceful then, before the massacres and Indian wars, and most of our days were spent hunting—as a newborn, I needed the blood, you see." He paused. Her eyes flickered open, brows pulling together in a halfhearted glare.

He swore under his breath. But continued. "I needed the blood, and Matthew wanted the sport—back then, he had spent too much time among humans, see, during the Revolutionary War, and not enough time in the wild, what with the general Lafayette and his work to help him as the chevalier de Clermont…" As he paused again, and noticed the soft flutter of Diana's eyelids, he also noticed something far more significant. Footsteps, halted on the stairwell. After hundreds of years of practice, he could immediately recognize his father's gait.

Steeling himself for another look of exasperation—and perhaps worse—he continued. "So we went into the wilderness, among the natives and dangerous animals, to teach me how to practice survival." By this point, Diana's breathing had normalized, as she fell at last into sleep. From his sprawled seat on the armchair, Marcus twisted his head backwards towards the entrance, raising his upside-down brows at Matthew's shadow in the doorway.

"Explain yourself," Marcus's father's voice suddenly murmured in his ear, a hand twisting sharply in his curls as Marcus found his vision filled with, sure enough, an exasperated Matthew.

The younger vampire winced, and found his head free to move just as quickly as it had lost its freedom. He swung his legs off the armchair, leaning back into the chair's arch instead as he contemplated his sire.

"She asked for a story," Marcus said, eyes twinkling in the daylight that filled the crack in the curtains. "I thought you wanted her happy, Matthew."

"If I wanted her to know those types of stories, I would tell her myself," his father said sharply. "You know our rules, Marcus. Is it so hard to follow them?"

"Well—"

"You also know that that was a rhetorical question," Matthew noted, meeting his son's eyes until they faded to stillness. "Enough, Marcus. If you can't be trusted to stay here without causing trouble, I won't ask you to stay any longer."

Before Marcus could open his mouth to retort, Diana stirred.

"Matthew? You're back?" She whispered.

"I am," he said, voice softening. "I'm here now." To the two vampires in the room, the relief in her body was palpable—her heartbeat slowed further.

"Good," she murmured. "Marcus thinks you don't trust him."

Matthew sighed, closing his eyes briefly before returning the full force of his lethal stare to his son. At that look, Marcus shrugged, averting his gaze. Unseen by the younger vampire and the witch, Matthew turned his eyes to the heavens, offering up a mental prayer for protection from prying witches and guilt-filled sons.

"I do trust him," the elder vampire said quietly, the force of his gaze making Marcus shift uncomfortably in his seat. "He is my only living child. If I didn't trust him, he wouldn't be here at all." Look at me, Matthew's eyes commanded silently.

When Marcus did, he could only grimace. "She asked," he said weakly. Matthew's lip curled up, a sign that his father's frustration was ending for the moment, at least. Diana, after all, was remarkably hard to resist. The elder vampire jerked his head towards the door in a fluid movement, eyes still on Marcus.

"We will talk later, Marcus," Matthew said, with only the tiniest hint of warmth to crack his frosty gaze. "Out you go." Without bothering to see if his son would follow his orders, knowing he would, Matthew strode to Diana's bedside, pausing as he looked into her resting face.

Behind him, Marcus straightened his jacket, already standing beside the comfortable armchair. As he drew a breath to speak, Matthew scowled without turning. "Now," he ordered. "And later."


	2. Chapter 2

Back at the lab, Marcus fiddled with the PCR machine. Miriam, who had given him a stern look and made him promise not to break any tubes before she left for dinner, still refused to tell him anything about his blood tests—and he was severely tempted to look.

With two hundred years of vampire life, of course, came a lot of time to learn how to hack.

But while he knew Matthew wouldn't truly care about a hack to see his own blood results, Marcus couldn't quite bring himself to do it—not when his father was already angry with him, and no matter how unreasonable that was, Marcus still felt a hint of shame.

That's the problem with father figures, he thought, spinning a computer dial aimlessly. They get in your head. Even without biting.

And that, really, was the root of the unending conflict between Marcus and Matthew: the former, running from his painful history with patriarchs; the latter, ever-willing to stamp out insurrection. Marcus snorted. No wonder Matthew had helped to put down so many revolutions.

"What's the joke?" Marcus was startled out of his thoughts by his father's approach, footsteps echoing down the basement hallway.

"Nothing," the younger said, eyes rolling. "Or nothing you need to know about, at any rate."

"Ah." Matthew paused across the room, picking up a blood-filled tube and spinning it through his fingers. Still facing away from his son, he glanced back at him, expression filled with cool amusement. "I sincerely thought your teenage years ended in the 19th century. Perhaps I was wrong."

Marcus snorted again. "Getting a new step-parent tends to do that to a vampire," he said.

"Is that what this is about?"

"This…" Marcus ran a hand through his curls, sighing. "It's about us, Matthew. All of us. How can you risk everything for a witch? You know the Congregation won't let you get away with this. Baldwin won't. Even Ysabeau—"

"They will," Matthew said dangerously. "Or they will learn to remember why they made me their killer."

"Baldwin, fine, but Ysabeau?"

"Ysabeau—will understand," Matthew said, haltingly for once. "She had Philippe. She knows what it's like. And she will like Diana."

"Will she?" Marcus frowned back at him. "Witches brought Philippe to the brink of death, Matthew. She will never forgive that."

Matthew raised his brows. "She will have to," he said simply. "We leave tomorrow."

With a grimace, Marcus raised his own brows. "Matthew—"

"Enough, Marcus. You have said more than enough." Matthew, it seemed, was done with arguing. "Meet me with a suitable car in the morning, and go do—whatever it is you do outside of the hospital."

With a sigh, Marcus cracked his neck and nodded. He returned his attention to the PCR tubes, fiddling with the dial once again. As he shouldn't have done, for in a heartbeat, his father had a hand clamping down on Marcus's shoulder—hard.

"And don't ever," Matthew said, "tell stories about me to Diana again. You know the rules. Am I quite clear?" His eyes flashed with controlled anger.

Rolling his eyes yet again, Marcus wrenched his shoulder from his father's grip—which had loosened just enough to let him go. A warning, not a punishment. "Crystal," he said, rubbing his newly sore neck.

"Good," Matthew said. "So we are equally clear—I meant what I said."

"About?" 

"You know what about." Matthew's eyes softened, brows furrowing as he reached out to turn Marcus towards him by the shoulder—a shadowed reflection of the previous moment, as his hand lingered on his son's arm. "After two hundred years of dealing with you, you should know that I trust you."

"Not as much as you would if—"

"I know," the elder vampire said, in a tone that sounded weary even for his many years. "But we have worked past that long enough. And, I hope, we have both rebuilt that trust." 

Marcus met his father's eyes for a long moment, before letting his attention drift to his shoulder. Shirt wrinkled, folds crumpled—Matthew had definitely spent a long time waiting with Diana. He looked back up, to find Matthew's eyes still on him, filled with the slightest hint of amusement. "Okay," he said.

"Good," his father said, lips curving upwards. Marcus was nearly startled when Matthew pulled him in—not the usual de Clermont farewell, but a genuine embrace. Letting him go, Matthew chuckled at the bemused expression on the younger's face. "Trust me," he said. "I'll take care of it."


End file.
